Herewiss shook his head. They were two streets away, around the corner from the square, all half-deafened by the noise. Segnbora was leaning against the fieldstone wall, gasping for air, Skádhwë now dimmed to a blackness outlined in pallid blue. Another thunderclap came from behind them—
Herewiss made for the corner, with Lorn beside him and Sunspark just behind. As they ran, the screaming started ahead of them, and they glanced at each other uncomfortably. Together they reached the corner, peered around it.
They were just in time to see the great crack that had stitched its way across the square, as it yawned further open. Lionhall was sagging over to one side, and uneasy groaning noises were coming from its stones.
Then the lightning struck for real; a huge bolt that came arcing down from the cloudy sky and struck the dome full on. It fell in ruin, but not so quickly that the two of them could fail to see the roof of the great foreporch fall in, and one huge slab of marble-faced granite crash down on the Lion’s statue, and shatter it. Only a glimpse of that noble head, cracked over sideways, sliding down to crash on the steps of the pedestal—then the rest of the roof followed after.
Herewiss looked over at Freelorn. His gaze lingered on Lionhall for a moment: then he looked over at Herewiss and said, “I think the battle’s started in earnest. We’d better get out of the city.”
The others had caught up with them from behind: Harald was helping Segnbora, who could barely walk at the moment. “—be all right,” she gasped. “Felt the earthquake coming, that was all. I think I ruined his calculations, just this once. Better get out!”
“How?” Harald said. “All the gates are held. And somehow I think you can’t do that again.”
Segnbora nodded weakly, but Freelorn frowned at her. “You’re off your head,” he said. “Save yourself for later.” And he grinned at Herewiss. “Besides, there are other ways.”
Herewiss looked at Freelorn blankly. Then he heard what Lorn was thinking. “Oh, Lorn,” he said. “No!”
“Why not? We know the way in. And we know the private ways out. What else were they put there for?”
“Lorn,” Dritt said, and poked him in the back with his bow. “What’re you thinking of?”
“An easy way out of the city.”
“Easy!!” Herewiss protested.
“Kynall,” Freelorn said. “There are ‘private’ ways in that only the family knows. And ways out.”
“The place is going to be crawling with Cillmod’s people!” Herewiss said. “Possibly even Rian—”
“Good,” Harald said. “A chance to put an arrow through him, then.”
Or light a fire under him when he’s not prepared for it, Sunspark said, baring its teeth.
“It has the advantage of being unexpected,” Dritt said, pushing his hair back out of the way. “Who would be crazy enough to do something like that?”
Herewiss opened his mouth, but Segnbora said, “Have you got a better idea? No? Then we’d better move, because that square right there alone has about fifty Arlene regulars still alive and moving in it, and if we don’t get out of here before they recover themselves—”
“This way,” Lorn said, and began threading his way into the dimness of the surrounding streets.
Along with the others, Herewiss followed him, shaking his head.
*
It has really started, hasn’t it? Segnbora said to him, some minutes later. They were leaning against the darker wall of a tiny alley, while Harald silently worked his way up to where it intersected with another. Behind him, Sunspark stalked along, all its fires damped down, its coat now black as a quenched coal.
There are sorcerers working in force out there, Segnbora said. I can feel their backlash even from here. She paused: Harald had vanished from sight. But it’s not dissipating. It’s being—absorbed—
Herewiss nodded. You’ve been feeling it too, then.
Harald’s hand came back into view, waved them forward. Like something trying to be born, Segnbora said, as the group headed toward him. Something dark.
Herewiss nodded, came to the corner, looked around, down at the other two streets intersecting, and the one Harald was leading them down, with Sunspark padding after. This was a street he and Lorn had staggered down once or twice in their youth: but this time of night, before, it had always been had other people in it, doing the same. No one seemed to have had much heart for going out drinking tonight, or out of doors at all.... No one had lit any of the lamps fixed to the walls, either, and the street was as dark as the inside of a cat; if not for the dim flickers of Fire from Skádhwë and Khávrinen, they all would have been walking into walls half the time. Even with good memory of the way the streets were laid out, a night like this ruined your sense of direction: the Moon hidden above clouds, and no stars, or ones that showed only fitfully between the blowing darknesses in the sky. Here and there a patch of light showed where some cloud thinned and hinted at the Moon one day off her full, standing high now, but almost always hidden. The weather-change, Herewiss thought, is his somehow. Of all times to not need rain, this is it.
Dritt had taken point now and was waving them still again. Herewiss put his back in a handy doorway, leaned his head out just far enough to watch: Segnbora, behind him, found another across the narrow street, and watched the way they had come. He felt the alarm flare in her mind as she saw something move, back down the street: her Fire towered up inside her like a hastily-lit beacon, mind-blinding, and struck out, invisible but direct and deadly as a crossbow bolt. The shape at the intersection of streets crumpled down into darkness. Dritt, she said, broadening the thought out far enough so that the rest could hear it, that was just a regular behind us. There are about ten more coming: he was an advance. They’ll be along in about three minutes, if I hear their minds correctly.
“Down there,” Freelorn whispered, pointing from behind Dritt. “Down that alley, then left.”
That’s the direction our friends will be coming from, Lorn.
“Can’t be helped,” Freelorn said softly. “That’s where the entrance is.”
Down the tiny street they went, a pause at the corner to see that all was clear: then rightward, down the alley Lorn had indicated. There were no doors in it, or windows even; just blind walls. From up in front came an abrupt scrabbling noise, and what sounded like a loud sigh. Herewiss looked down with regret at the source as he passed it: a man in Arlene livery who had had, from the looks of him, had a thin knife put into him just above where the heart-nerves meet and knot. To the othersenses, a thin cloud of radiance hovered about the body: undifferentiated soul, in shock, not knowing it was dead yet. In passing, Herewiss reached out in mind and snuffed out the sputtering glitter of nerve-fire in the brain, the true “silver cord” that bound soul to body, and wished the man well on his way to the Shore.
“Here,” he heard Freelorn say to Dritt. They paused before a blank space of wall, and Herewiss and Segnbora caught up with Lorn and the others, and looked at it doubtfully.
“Are you sure, Lorn?” Herewiss said.
Freelorn ran his hands up the wall. A narrow section of it, one which had looked like a six-foot-high pillar of square-hewn stone, slid abruptly inward.
“Can I have a week to diet myself first?” said Dritt, eyeing it unhappily. The opening was no more than a foot wide. Freelorn turned sideways, and squeezed in: it took him a moment. “Breathe out first,” he said, and his voice echoed slightly. “Come on!”
Segnbora slipped in after him, and after her, Sunspark, flowing through effortlessly. “All very well for you,” Harald muttered, but went after, grunting. Herewiss stood and watched the street, up and down: there was a sound of footsteps somewhere not too far off, and with the twisting and turning of alleys and the reflection of sound by walls in all directions, no way to tell where it came from.
Dritt squeezed in, having trouble. Herewiss waited, forcing himself to calm, though all his mind was shouting, Come on, come on— And then the first of them came arou
nd the corner and saw him. Before the man could understand what he was seeing, and pass that information all unwitting to whatever mind looked through his, Herewiss put a bolt of Fire straight into the soldier’s brain. He was dead before he finished falling. And Herewiss did the same for the second, who was following close on the first man’s heels, and then the third; behind them, in the next street, outcry broke out as their bodies fell. With a last gasp, Dritt made it through the gap, and Herewiss, swearing at having had to kill, went after him, and had trouble getting himself through that gap as the fourth man came around the corner. In anguish Herewiss killed him too, pushed through the opening, and staggered forward into a small shadowy space.
Behind him, the stone thumped into its former place. “All right,” Lorn said, and light flared from Skádhwë, showing a narrow stair cut downwards into the grey stone. He led the way down it. At the bottom was a long hallway, with rough-hewn walls, reaching away in both directions.
“You never showed me this tunnel,” Herewiss said.
“I never had time. My father only showed it to me about half a year before he died.” Lorn looked thoughtful. “That end goes down to the north rivergate.”
“No point in going that way,” Dritt said. “There’ve been regulars there in force for three days.”
“Where does the other end go?”
“Come see,” Freelorn said, and headed down the tunnel.
They walked for some minutes, sometimes up small flights of steps, sometimes down, always more or less eastward. “Thank the Goddess for my nervous ancestors,” Freelorn said softly. “If they hadn’t been so certain the Steldenes were going to invade, we wouldn’t have had any of this.”
“It may not help,” Herewiss said. “Lorn, I’m sure we were seen.”
“Even if we were, it’ll take a while for the news to travel.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Herewiss said. The whole city had a feeling over it, stronger than ever, of a chilly, watchful consciousness, dipping down into unprotected minds at its leisure and using their senses for its own purposes. It was a kind of casual mind-rape that horrified Herewiss, but would not bother the spider at the center of the web even slightly: and Lorn’s side might suffer because none of those with him were willing to use such tactics. Or capable, said one of the more tactless and ruthless parts of Herewiss’s mind. And what about that? What do we do when the battle starts in earnest, and Cillmod’s sorcerers drop warfetter on half the Darthenes, not caring about the ethics of it, not even caring that they themselves will die of the backlash? But there was no using such sorceries on the Goddess’s business: that would be to play directly into the Shadow’s hands. Lorn and Eftgan would just have to find a way to be cleverer, or at least faster—
They came to a steep narrow stairway. “Here’s the tricky part,” Freelorn said. “Up at the top is where we have to come out. Put yourself up there and see what you ‘hear’.”
“Where are we?”
“I told you, Kynall. Go on.”
Herewiss softfooted it up the stairs, put himself against the wall, closed his eyes, and listened.
Rian! was the first thing he heard: that particular bland-sharp taste of mind, unmistakeably shadowed, the darkness hanging over it—but bizarrely unconcerned, as if a bird should nest in the snake’s coils and sit there singing. Herewiss shuddered all over, but a gingerly touch here and there told him that the other’s mind was preoccupied, bound up in the business going on out in the fields across Arlid. Rian’s mind was all business—purposeful, almost cheerful, untroubled by ructions in the city. There was a sense of great satisfaction with one of them, in fact. Herewiss’s jaw clenched: he suspected he knew which one.
But other minds were more Herewiss’s business now. He felt about him, the Fire glancing off stone, wood, questing up and down and about, until in his mind he had made a shadowy diagram of walls and floors, and moving in it, the bright sparks of minds attached to bodies.
“No one nearby on this level,” he said to Freelorn. “About ten on the next floor above, and seventeen on the floor below. How long will we be exposed when we come out?”
“Just a couple of minutes. There’s another doorway I have to find.”
Freelorn pushed past him. Herewiss touched him in passing: not so much in reassurance as to quietly attach a spark of Fire to him. To Herewiss’s sight it wove a quick webwork about Freelorn, disguising somewhat the specific and unmistakeable signature of his mind, blurring it into an impression of vague excitement. It was the best Herewiss could do for him at the moment.
“Now?” Lorn said. Herewiss nodded, now being as good a time as any. Lorn reached up, touched something on the blank black wall.
The panel slipped inward again, leaving more leeway this time. Herewiss damped down Khávrinen’s light, and slipped through after Lorn, into blackness: but not total now. A faint square of moonlight glowed on the polished floor in the middle of the huge room, then faded again as the cloud covered the Moon over.
They were off to one side of the Queens’ Hall. Lorn spared the Throne only a glance: then he was off to one side, heading for the corridor that led away rightward. Sunspark bounded silently after him.
Herewiss followed them, keeping off to the far side of the room, moving silently: the others came after. Now what is he— he thought, as Lorn headed up the long stairway that led up to the old living quarters.
Up the stairs they went after him, a pause there to look around the corner, down the long hallway: Herewiss’s othersenses were ahead of him, questing about for any life—but there was none, at least at the moment, all breathing and thinking being done in rooms further down in the wing. The sense of Rian about his business hung over everything, though, and the sweat broke out all over Herewiss as they made their way down the hall, past the old wooden presses and tapestries. And that door off to the right, one he knew well—
Freelorn paused, looked at Herewiss: Herewiss felt about ever so gingerly with the Fire, and nodded. Lorn pushed the door open. It opened silently—if there was one technique Lorn had ever mastered, it was getting that door to open without the squeak that happened when any other human being moved it. He vanished into the darkness of the room, and Herewiss followed him, slowly, into Freelorn’s old bedroom.
They slipped, one after another, into the room, and Lorn shut the door behind them, silently again. And to Herewiss he whispered, “Look at it all. Just look. Guess whose room this is now.”
Herewiss allowed the faintest possible trickle of Flame to run down Khávrinen’s blade, for there was no other light: the window was all covered by a hanging. The old sword-hacked four-poster bed was gone. Big tables lined the walls, and on them— He frowned with distaste. Books, many of them from rr’Virendir, the Palace’s archive—some of them he recognized, having consulted them himself. But some of them were obviously grimoires, with old mouldering bindings. Their looks were unpleasant enough, but the feel they made against the air, against the fabric of things, was more vile. The room had become a sorcerer’s workshop. The usual paints and chalks were stocked on one of the tables, in neat pots: a wand, knife, cup, brazier for fire, were laid off to one side, all tidy—no unclean substances, no eldritch mess. All the same, the feeling of what works had been done there recently, now floated in the atmosphere the way the sewer-stink had in the alleys. Herewiss fought a desire to sneeze.
Freelorn was off to one side, fumbling with the paneling over the stone. “Now what the—” He stopped himself in time. “Ah.” A faint grating noise—
The panel slipped back, revealing darkness. “Come on,” Herewiss said, getting an itchy feeling that boded no good. “Hurry!” He practically pushed Dritt through the opening ahead of him: Sunspark went after. Harald followed. Herewiss glanced around, and saw Segnbora moving around the room, peering into corners, lifting hangings aside. He was puzzled: her manner was somewhat urgent. “‘Berend—!” he hissed.
“Patience,” she said. “This is important. There’s something here
I have to—” She took in breath. “Here it is,” she said. “I knew I saw it—!” She reached into a dark corner, pushing a tapestry aside, and seized something. A long pole— Herewiss stared at her as she swung past him, smiling in the darkness.
“What—”
“Come on,” she said softly, and vanished through the secret doorway.
Herewiss went after her, and almost tripped on the first step, as he had always almost tripped on it. This tunnel he knew: it connected with several others under Kynall, but its main purpose was to lead outward, with its exit on the far side of the river. He tapped the lever that sent the panel back on its tracks again, and followed the others down, pacing himself by Skádhwë’s soft light bobbing ahead of him. Cast shadows bobbed all down the hallway—from Lorn leading the way, from Sunspark, trotting along low and smooth, from Dritt and Harald following it, from the pole Segnbora carried. But not from Segnbora—
They came to that long, long flight of stairs Herewiss remembered: twenty steps down and a landing, another twenty and a landing, on and on and on. Then the tunnel bottomed out, and went ahead straight and level for a long way. The air grew cold; the walls grew damp, and the silence grew profound and oppressive. Herewiss had always thought, when they came down here, that you should be able to hear the river above you, running over its stones: but there was never anything but this silence. If nothing else, he thought, at least that “watched” feeling is less. He tested, extending the Fire within him against the fabric of the world, in what would have been the first move toward attempting a gating. The world gave under the pressure most satisfactorily. It was as he thought—even Rian couldn’t suppress gating for miles all around. Especially not if the battle had started, and he had other things to concentrate on—